Just get it in everyone's arms as fast as possible, all this dicking around with rules around who can or should get it now that it's plentiful is just slowing everything down.
[1] to the point that 'we' should be doing a lot more to get our excess to countries that are still struggling.
Still, I don't see how public health would benefit from not recommending shots to everyone as there is no downside.
You'd get all the never infected people vaccinated sooner; so 'everyone' (except anti-vax not infected prior to effective 'herd immunity') would be immune sooner.
In practice, don't underestimate how much more inefficient or troublesome a seemingly simple additional rule or exception might be to administer... :P
And while trying to predict second-order behavior effects is tricky either way it is pretty clear that saying "don't get the vaccine if you already had Covid" would scare some people away.
I had quite the opposite experience ; plenty of people told me they had (mild) flu symptoms - a lot of TMI, to be honest - and assumed they had had COVID already. It later turned out, with no exception, that they absolutely did not.
Scaring those people away would probably hurt a lot, at least in my anecdotal experience.
Do you mean tested for antibodies with finger prick blood test, or PCR random number generator (see elon musk wild PCR results).
I was sick, had test that showed antibodies, and a confirmation letter from my Dr.
Since the EUA to rush out the vaccines does not include those who had it and recovered, it needs more testing and study before it is approved for those who have antibodies. The jab is not risk-free.
I was in a similar position as you: possible early COVID exposure (though no symptoms), several positive antibody tests, but absolutely zero side effects from either Pfizer shot. Annoyed not a few people though by my lack of any reaction to the shots, so that was kinda fun.
The VAERS data suggests there are numerous groups at very low risk from Covid for which this may not be the case.
VAERS data needs to be interpreted with special care. It's not equivalent to a safety study with a proper experimental design. It has a whole lot of legal and administrative context to account for.
Dying or having an adverse event after vaccination also isn't the same as dying from vaccination; even the genuine VAERS reports don't permit teasing this wrinkle out on their own.
And you'd be committing a felony. I see this idea tossed around all the time that tons of the reports coming in are fake, but so far have seen scant evidence that that's the case.
> Dying or having an adverse event after vaccination also isn't the same as dying from vaccination; even the genuine VAERS reports don't permit teasing this wrinkle out on their own.
Okay, but then why are so many more people reporting dying after Covid-19 vaccination than have reported dying after flu shots which have been administered to millions of people for decades?
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2017/may/11/bill-zedle...
> In a July 2005 web post, Dr. James R. Laidler wrote: "The chief problem with the VAERS data is that reports can be entered by anyone and are not routinely verified. To demonstrate this, a few years ago I entered a report that an influenza vaccine had turned me into The Hulk. The report was accepted and entered into the database.
> "Because the reported adverse event was so… unusual," Laidler wrote, "a representative of VAERS contacted me. After a discussion of the VAERS database and its limitations, they asked for my permission to delete the record, which I granted. If I had not agreed, the record would be there still, showing that any claim can become part of the database, no matter how outrageous or improbable."
As for your question about the numbers:
https://www.politifact.com/article/2021/may/03/vaers-governm...
> Moss explained one way VAERS can amplify fears about the COVID-19 vaccine in particular. Most vaccinations are given to a small segment of the population: young, healthy children, who are generally less likely to have health problems afterward. But the COVID-19 vaccine is given to a much larger group — all Americans 16 and older are eligible now. And the earliest recipients included a large number of elderly patients and adults with preexisting health problems.
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaers/fact-chec...
> “To date, VAERS has not detected patterns in cause of death that would indicate a safety problem with COVID-19 vaccines.”
> Moss explained one way VAERS can amplify fears about the COVID-19 vaccine in particular. Most vaccinations are given to a small segment of the population: young, healthy children, who are generally less likely to have health problems afterward. But the COVID-19 vaccine is given to a much larger group — all Americans 16 and older are eligible now. And the earliest recipients included a large number of elderly patients and adults with preexisting health problems.
This is trivially accounted for by comparing Covid and influenza vaccines. If I limit to ages 18-59 I get ~73,000 total adverse events for influenza vaccines across their entire history, and 173,000 adverse events for Covid vaccines since they started to be administered at the beginning of the year.
- The vast majority of new drugs that undergo safety trials are found to have serious side effects.
- The near totality of new vaccines that undergo safety trials are found to have a formidably beneficial risk profile.
Don't make the mistake of applying the same risk heuristic in your mind for both things. Risk assessments in science have absolutely nothing to do with politics.
[1] https://www.kfyrtv.com/2021/03/15/health-experts-say-those-p...
This study appears to be based on following up with a single hospital's own database of people who tested positive. But I imagine you would get different results if you just found a bunch of people and asked them to self-report their prior infection status before enrolling them in the study.
Agree on the self-reporting, but I guess my larger point is he already doesn't want to get the vax and people telling him that his natural immunity is not sufficient makes him even more distrustful since he does know enough about science/statistics to see that natural immunity is about equal with a vaccine as far as we can tell.
The vaccines are important in establishing herd immunity, but I don’t understand the desire to jab people who already have established immunity.
You don’t need to convince me to get vaccinated, but this is a profoundly unscientific statement. The mRNA vaccines are a brand new technology that would not have been approved without several years of human trials if there was not a pandemic justifying rushing through the normal process.
So far so good, but the immune system is a complex system and we can’t rule out some unexpected side effects for some people some of the time.
I'm not a "anti-vaxxer" "conspiracy theorist" "racist" "sexist" "nazi" but the risk is just too low for me to care. If you think covid can affect you, take the vaccine and don't bother me. I self isolated weeks before the government told me so because we didn't know what the risk involved was. By the time the government approved a 2 weeks lockdown which turned into 1 year and a half, it was already evident the risks were minimal. This is all a political play and I shudder when I think about what's coming next. Shall we do a climate change lockdown next? Or shall we try some more covid variants first?
I also don't think vaccines are likely to be dangerous (minus the platelets / blood clots issue - hopefully no long term issues pop up in 10 years).
Also, the downside is that everyone is paying for these shots, they're not free and they come out of the taxes the government steals from me every month - and they accomplish very little. Same as the flu shots.
Owing to the dramatic risk asymmetry between vaccine and disease, it's probably better to implement a policy that optimizes more for expediency, simplicity (fewer rules and fewer exceptions) and, in this case, minimizing the number of false assumptions made about the status of individuals. ie.: in the context of vaccination it's sometimes better to not assume that everyone who claims to have been previously infected was actually infected, even if we have lab data to back up this assumption.
I'm not saying current policies all make perfect sense or anything, but it doesn't particularly surprise me that everyone is being accounted for in the same way WRT the vaccine.